Unwanted

Angelina Jolie tries to persuade Morgan Freeman to see things her way in Wanted.

Originally posted July 8, 2008

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

While much of the world awaits Angelina Jolie’s delivery of twins, here’s what I’ve been wondering: How does someone who, by all appearances, wants to save the planet one child at a time (and you’ve got to be very cynical not to commend that) decide to act in a movie like Wanted? I’m not talking about the critical value (O.K., there isn’t much) but rather the ethos of the film, which seems to say: Life is cheap. Right needs might. Nerds should pack heat (also knives and blunt instruments like computer keyboards). If you haven’t murdered someone today, you’re really lazy.

It’s not enough that director Timur Bekmambetov has a fetishistic thing for bullets, so that we have to watch them close up, in slo-mo, as they shatter glass, curve (care of the curvebullet shooter played by James McAvoy) around Jolie’s stunning face to merely tousle her hair—well, what would you do if you were that bullet?—and, mostly, tear through human heads with the attendant blood, sinew, and bone. (And the silver bullets are pretty, too, with carvings of various kinds. Objets d’art.) No, he wants to take cold-heartedness to a higher level, so that, for example, a simple bull’s-eye target for shooting practice won’t do; nor will grotesque pig carcasses. For this in-your-face flick, only real human bodies measure up—dead bodies, to be sure, but hung on meat hooks, huge iron hooks going right through them, one of them looking like your grandmother. I don’t know what to make of this. Are we to applaud the seriousness of the cabal—I mean, fraternity—of assassins (I see I’ve been avoiding getting into the absurd, incomplete, and derivative plot, which involves a monastery, an oracle loom, and suicide-bomber rats), who just want to be really good at what they do?

I had a hard enough time with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which, of course, Jolie starred with the future other half of Brangelina (O.K., maybe that one was fate) as spouses who, unbeknownst to each other at first, are assassins. Secret marital murderous thoughts notwithstanding, are we really supposed to delight in watching the Smiths try to hurt and kill each other? And then they come together against a common enemy at the end—isn’t it cute?—to create mayhem and your general blood-splattering, assault weapons blazing. (For some reason that I can’t remember—comic effect?—this last part takes place in a vacant home-improvement store.) The Times’ capsule TV-listing review called it “a goof and a drag.” Precisely, with the “drag” scale skimming the floor.

But Wanted, in which Jolie plays yet another foxy (oh funny, her name is Fox!) assassin (who is not only tattooed, natch, but branded), ventures quite a bit further in the offensiveness department, mainly with scenes involving the “training” of a new hit man (McAvoy). A lot of Wanted seems to revisit Fight Club. I say “seems to” because I avoided Fight Club (though by coincidence I have a coffee-cup bathrobe like the one Pitt—we’re still keeping it in the family—wears in the movie). I’ve got this peculiar aversion to people getting their faces smashed in; therefore, I had my eyes closed for about a quarter of Wanted. Indeed, the initiation shown in that film pretty much consists of torture—beatings, stabbings, etc. From what I’ve heard, the violence in Fight Club had an artistic point. (I realize this is also true of The Sopranos, but I always wondered about what that does to the audience—is it encouraging sadistic impulses, all of this violence as entertainment? Or at the least isn’t there something disconcerting about people having spaghetti parties for marathon watching of Tony & Co.’s craven acts?) But with Wanted (bad title, by the way), it seems to be the point.

I think we know that Jolie doesn’t need the money. Speaking of the Wanted role, she told Vanity Fair: “It’s about being physical and jumping and running and being violent, and instinctively I knew I needed to do that.” I guess for her it was just a goof. And that’s a drag.

The Best Film About the Porn Industry Since “Boogie Nights”

Cherry (Ashley Hinshaw) and Frances (James Franco) look for love in the world of XXX.

About Cherry

Directed by Stephen Elliott

Written by Stephen Elliott and Lorelei Lee

Starring Ashley Hinshaw, James Franco, Heather Graham, Dev Patel, and Lily Taylor

By Robert Rosen

There was a time in the porn industry, about 25 years ago, when people spoke of X-rated films that had “crossover potential.” I discuss this phenomenon at some length in my book Beaver Street, in a scene where I’m asked to play a “nerdy file clerk” in Tickled Pink, which I describe as “a screwball comedy with hardcore sex.” This is a historic film, I’m told, because, “never before had a porn movie employed fourteen paid extras in one non-sex scene.”

Tickled Pink, like a lot of other pornos produced in this brief “Golden Age,” had “upscale production values,” a quality soundtrack, “performers who could act and fuck,” and a well-plotted script written by a smart young director who just happened to be passing through smut on his way to respectability.

Tickled Pink never did crossover into the mainstream. Nor has any other porn flick. In fact, with the porn industry having degenerated into amateur exhibitionism on sites like YouPorn, and professional studs wired on Viagra engaging, as the inimitable adult-industry critic Gail Dines would put it, in “body-punishing sex” with a succession of anonymous starlets, the idea of crossover porno has been long forgotten.

Though it comes very close, About Cherry contains no hardcore sex and therefore cannot be called a crossover movie. It does, however, contain a lot of very explicit sex scenes, and is also the best and most realistic film about the porn industry I’ve seen since Boogie Nights. It’s certainly the best movie yet to be made about pornography in the 21^st century, an age when the Internet has taken over and relegated what remains of the venerable “men’s magazine” industry to its deathbed.

This realism can be attributed to About Cherry’s co-writers, director Stephen Elliott, who has written extensively about sex, and Lorelei Lee, a porn star who plays a porn star in the film. Obviously, they both know the business, and their insider knowledge and experience comes across in such scenes as when Angelina aka Cherry, played by the gorgeous young actress Ashley Hinshaw, is interviewed by a porn production company before they hire her to make videos.

Realistically depicted, as well, is the arc of a porn star’s career—single-girl still shoot/single-girl video/two-girl video/boy-girl video—as is the nature of a porn star’s romantic relationship. Cherry begins dating Frances (James Franco), a wealthy coke-addict attorney who doesn’t hesitate to tell her what he thinks of her job: “It’s disgusting.”

The extraordinary ensemble of actors—notably Heather Graham as Margaret, Cherry’s lesbian mentor/director who’s dealing with a jealous girlfriend; Dev Patel as Andrew, Cherry’s supportive gay friend; and Lily Taylor as Phyllis, Cherry’s alcoholic mother—create a milieu of such verisimilitude it can, at times, border on queasy. But the porn industry can, indeed, be a very queasy place.

The plot is basic: Cherry, a high school student, runs away from her dysfunctional family and sleazy boyfriend, Bobby (Jonny Weston), accompanied by Andrew. She winds up in San Francisco, needs a job, and after waitressing in a strip club, finds her way into porn. What’s different is that About Cherry, unlike, say, Boogie Nights, ends on a positive note, if not necessarily a happy one.

Guaranteed to piss off Gail Dines, and that’s a good thing.

UK to US: Have a Little Faith

Paloma Faith at the Edison Ballroom in New York City.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

The Olympics are so last night (the highlight of the Games for me: a fencer screaming her head off at every jab as though she were in a horror film), but that’s okay: the latest across-the-pond phenomenon, in reverse, is singer Paloma Faith, a pint-sized firecracker with formidable lungs (yes, firecrackers of this species have lungs). Recently, she gave a concert—after being introduced by music honcho L. A. Reid (what did he say? I don't remember, but he scared me a little with his stern tone, and really there was no need to scare us into liking this extremely likable 26-year-old, who was willing to jiggle for us while singing her tune “Cellulite”)—at the intimate Edison Ballroom in NYC’s Theater District. (It's attached to the Edison Hotel, which has a kind of funky Old World café beloved by actors.)    

Wearing a long black satiny dress with giant-rhinestone X straps in the back that matched her rhinestone-studded ear monitors, the saucy songstress endeared herself to the crowd with her Duffy-like sound, humorous patter, and down-to-earth demeanor. (I’m also partial to her straight-line black eyebrows, set in a tiny porcelain-complected face that’s topped off with elaborately coiffed blond/bronze hair.) In the course of the evening—her appearance evoking the 40s, her dance-inflected music the 70s—she draped herself across not only a studio piano but also a miniature one. Following in the blue-eyed soul tradition that includes Adele and Amy Winehouse, she didn’t quite hit the emotional highs and lows as those beloved fellow Brits, but, backed up by two singers with synchronized moves (take that, Olympic swimmers) and gold-sequined skirts, she spread a kind of pixie dust—you had to smile and you had to move.

Her set included the UK hit “Picking Up the Pieces“ and “30 Minute Love Affair,” both from her new album Fall to Grace, but the song that drew the loudest response was “New York” (despite the lyric “It was New York, New York/She poisoned your sweet mind”). That song was a hit in the UK too, but “it really belongs to you,” Faith told her Gotham fans.

Declaring that her success in England has not enabled her to buy a house, she seemed to want to belong to us herself. Okay with me—did I mention she ran with the Olympic torch while wearing red platform stilettos? 

Two for the Long Road

The look of love: Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg).

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger

Written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack

Starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Here’s the main reason I liked Celeste and Jesse Forever: it acknowledges that life holds many possibilities but not all of these can be fulfilled, and that luck and circumstance often have as much to do with what happens to us as our own choices—in other words, our choices do not exist in a vacuum, so half the time we don’t know what we’re doing.

Indeed, Jesse—a somewhat restrained Andy Samberg—at one point bluntly tells his soulmate (or is she?) Celeste, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” even as he’s trying to set himself on a more self-determined path.

Rashida Jones, who plays Celeste, a savvy media consultant separated from the artist/slacker Jesse, co-wrote the script—with Will McCormack, also in the film, as a philosophic pot dealer—which could easily have succumbed to rom-com formula. Instead, it hints at a maturity that goes well beyond the Apatow-esque shticks Celeste and Jesse amuse themselves with and the inevitable will-they-or-won’t-they-get-back-together question at the heart of the story.

Having decided to divorce six months before (“The father of my child will own a car” is Celeste’s shorthand explanation for the split), the two have settled into a BFF situation. Jesse lives in his artist’s studio behind Celeste’s L.A. house, and the pair see each other every day, as Celeste’s “regular” best friend, Beth (played by a refreshingly real Ari Graynor), angrily points out over dinner one night. This complacent relationship is threatened only when Jesse—in the company of, of course, Celeste—runs into Veronica (Rebecca Dayan), a one-night stand (mid-separation) that he hasn’t told his sort-of-ex-wife about.

Veronica (who has crooked front teeth! Where did director Lee Toland Krieger find these attractive but kind of normal-looking actors?) throws Jesse a shy but dazzling smile in the middle of a bookstore, thus, for “trend analyst” Celeste, ironically underscoring the title of her new book, Shitegeist—“I read that!” Veronica tells her—while also, for the audience, calling into question the movie title’s “forever.” 

Except that the clever people behind this film know that “forever” transcends doodles and tree-carvings—that it may even transcend our notions of what love, friendship, and romance itself mean.

Suu Kyi’s Choice

Burmese soldiers police the estate of Aung San Suu Kyi 
(Michelle Yeoh), who is under house arrest.

The Lady

Directed by Luc Besson

Written by Rebecca Frayn

Starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

I knew little about the Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—recently elected to the parliament of Burma (also referred to as Myanmar)—before seeing Beyond Rangoon in 1995. In that movie, the main character, played by Patricia Arquette, stumbles into, while on vacation, the violent upheaval taking place in Burma. At one point, standing in a crowd, she sees Suu Kyi, the hope of the oppressed Burmese people, walking toward her; the older woman, with a Mona Lisa smile, gazes at her in a way that seems to impart an otherworldly serenity. (Indeed, my husband, fellow blogger Robert Rosen, was similarly affected by our filmic encounter with Suu Kyi—he talked about the value of serenity for months afterward.)

The new biopic The Lady (its title echoing Suu Kyi’s honorific in her native country) contains a similar scene, only this time the stakes are much higher: With Gandhian courage, Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh), the epitome of grace under pressure, slowly makes her way through a phalanx of soldiers, who warn her to stop while aiming their rifles directly at her face. Such is the power of someone willing to die for a cause, in this case democracy for a country that has anointed her its savior. We learn that she is, in a way, an accidental savior, having been born the daughter of a general who became a martyr in the fight for democracy, and having arrived from her home in England to care for her dying mother just as Burma is exploding with revolt and bloody crackdowns.

Eventually, Suu Kyi and her family—her husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis), an Oxford academic, and their two sons—realize that if she leaves Burma, she will never be allowed to re-enter the country. And so Aris and the boys content themselves with visits—until the time comes when, in a tactical ploy, they are denied entry. “You have the freedom to choose: your family or your country,” a government official tells Suu Kyi. “What kind of freedom is that?” she answers.

I had to wonder if Suu Kyi’s husband was really that consistently supportive. As a teacher dealing with that part of the world, he too was passionate about democracy in Burma, but the movie never indicates the slightest hesitation as monumental decisions are made, despite the months and then years that pass without the boys seeing their mother. (You can almost hear hearts breaking when they inevitably lose the connection during their occasional phone calls, which Suu Kyi makes from the British embassy.)

Suu Kyi spends much of the film under house arrest—the house being her family’s, the general’s, a grand if decaying mansion on a lake. (You may recall the news reports a few years ago when an American man swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s house, thus jeopardizing her freedom.) With its terraces overlooking the water, it looks beautiful, as do the orchids in Suu Kyi’s hair and her colorful long skirts and delicate blouses.

A dead ringer for Suu Kyi, the ultra-slim Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) conveys not only the activist’s bravery and dignity but also the anguish she suffers as her own sacrifices become her husband’s and sons’ as well. In depicting Suu Kyi’s remarkable story through the prism of her family life, screenwriter Rebecca Frayn and director Luc Besson have made their own wise choice.

Earle and More at the City Winery

Steve Earle with one of his many guitars.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Watching Steve Earle and Allison Moorer in concert Monday night at the City Winery brought to mind another musical couple: also-populist-singer Bruce Springsteen and also-redheaded-wife-and-musician-in-her-own-right Patti Scialfa (though Moorer is moorer, I mean more, of a strawberry blonde). And I thought: god, how we need these people. Earle is inspiring in his been-there knowingness, down-to-earth accessibility, political outspokenness (or maybe outsungness—listen to “John Walker’s Blues”), and I-still-have-hope-ness.

Moorer—looking chic in a ruched black skirt, very high boots, and black-frame glasses she said she wore because “they kinda go with the outfit, and god knows it’s all about the outfit”—appears to be, if not a deus ex machina for Earle, perhaps an earth-goddess ex musica. It’s hard not to think that she, younger by a generation, shone a light into what has been at times a rough life (Earle was a heroin addict and spent time in jail). Especially when Earle sings a song like “Every Part of Me” (“I love you with all my heart/All my soul/Every part of me) or “Waitin’ on the Sky” (“Singing a song about a red-headed girl…I am sitting on top of the world”), both off the recent release I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, nominated for a Grammy for best folk album.

Though her porcelain looks might make you think nothing bad has ever touched her (she’s like a cross between Nicole Kidman and Taylor Swift), Moorer too has known some very dark days; her father and mother died in a murder-suicide when she and her older sister, singer Shelby Lynne, were teenagers. Monday night Moorer sang, among other originals, “A Soft Spot to Fall,” which made a splash a while back as part of the Horse Whisperer soundtrack, as well as a dramatic new song involving a thunderstorm and a hurricane—“Songs that I seem to be writing now have to do with tense situations,” she explained, adding that in this case she wanted to call someone “a bitch-face” but wrote the song instead.

Her voice is both lovely and strong, with a tone similar to Lynne’s—they recently toured together for the first time. Hearing Moorer’s harmonies with Earle, it occurred to me that he could have been tempted to marry her just to have at the ready that oxymoronically bluesy-ethereal sound as a counterpoint to his country-gritty one.

Both with and without Moorer, Earle gives good show—and had the sweat-soaked shirt to show for it. With the help of several guitars, a mandolin, a bouzouki (“It’s called a bouzouki —unless you’re going through an airport; then it’s not a bouzouki, especially if you’re me”), and a harmonica, he did 21 tunes, including the audience requests “Copperhead Road” and “Galway Girl.” For the latter Moorer joined him on accordion (“She only learned to play this instrument before we went on tour last spring—it freaks me out”).

The concert also featured Mike Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing, doing tunes such as the exhilaratingly bitter “Na-Na-Nothing” (“It has that certain Mötley Crüe je ne sais quoi,” Doughty joked) and reading from his new memoir, The Book of Drugs—as Earle pointed out, he too has a book out, a novel that shares the title of his new CD, both alluding to the Hank Williams song. Throughout their residency at City Winery, Mondays through February 6, Earle and Moorer are featuring guests such as Doughty and the Mastersons, who’ve toured with them as members of the Dukes and Duchesses.

Yes, we can! Sing, that is. And listen to others do so with every part of themselves—an act that somehow carries with it hope and inspiration. 

It’s About Them

John Mellencamp at Sun Studios in Memphis.

It’s About You

Directed by Kurt Markus and Ian Markus

Starring John Mellencamp

By Robert Rosen

Having married a musician and written a biography of John Lennon, I take an interest in music documentaries of all kinds, even those about musicians whose work I don’t feel a great passion for. Such is the case with John Mellencamp. Though I’ve enjoyed some of his earlier songs, like “Pink Houses” and “Jack and Diane,” for the most part I find his later material lacks excitement.

Even though the documentary It’s About You, directed by photographer Kurt Markus and his son, Ian, focuses more on Mellencamp’s later material, it’s at times a compellingly unique film—not only because it was shot in Super 8 and recorded with a vintage microphone and a mono reel-to-reel tape recorder, but because Kurt Markus plays an unusually large role in it.

As he follows Mellencamp and his band on a 2009 tour through the decaying landscape of the American south, and as they record the album No Better Than This, Markus provides wry voiceovers as he searches for his own identity through Mellencamp, whom he’s known for decades. He doesn’t interview Mellencamp, or accept an invitation to join him on the tour bus. It’s not reality-TV, Markus notes, and he doesn’t want to intrude. Nor does he manage to film or interview Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson when they show up. Instead, he tells us what we missed in a voiceover. It’s this sort of thing that gives the film its homemade charm. Ultimately, like Mellencamp's music, It's About You is sometimes evocative and sometimes a little boring.

My favorite bit was Harvard professor Cornel West backstage, grooving to “Pink Houses.”

Britney’s Got a Gun

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Bloody ’ell! Britney Spears’s brand-new video for “Criminal,” co-starring boyfriend Jason Trawick, has gotten politicians’ knickers in a twist across the pond. Seems that Spears did not reveal that she’d be packing heat in the mini-movie when she asked permission to, um, shoot in the working-class borough of Hackney, where not so long ago shops were being looted and cars going up in flames.

Spears says the song’s “cool concept”—I’m in love with a criminal, Mama! It’s physical, not rational!—was developed way before the London riots, though that doesn’t explain the choice of location, where council members have objected to her “rudeness” in glamorizing gangs and violence, sending youth the wrong message. Amid the literally steamy (in-the-shower) sex scenes, the armed robberies, and the oddly attractive loft-lair (new design idea: criminal chic—this neo–Bonnie and Clyde duo even have shelves of books, which get shot up too!), I didn’t notice any gang members, though a lot of tattoos (visual clue?) are on display. The gunplay is cartoonish, the real (-looking) violence occurring when Spears’s initially posh character and Trawick’s outlaw character kick and punch her abusive boyfriend with abandon, which is actually where the wrong message goes out. It’s kind of a Hollywood staple that it’s okay to hurt bad guys, but unless you’re defending yourself, no, it’s not.

Still, it would have been fun to see a skinhead Britney (miss her!), pierced tongue gleaming, tagging Britannia with red spray paint—“Fuck da police! I’m toxic!”—and maybe a Princess-of-Pop takedown of the Duchess of Cambridge. Or am I the one being rude now?

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Cheyenne Jackson and Jason Butler Harner.

The Green

Directed by Steven Williford

Written by Paul Marcarelli

Starring Jason Butler Harner, Cheyenne Jackson, Julia Ormond, and Illeana Douglas

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

The story of a gay couple living in a leafy Connecticut harbor town (having left New York City a few years before), The Green, though an original story, has the somewhat stilted, somewhat static feel that films based on plays (see Spinning into Butter) often do. The script was written by Paul Marcarelli, best known as the Verizon spokesman constantly asking, “Can you hear me now?” in TV ads. Despite the tone of the movie (it’s as though it needs more air, eponymous greenery notwithstanding) we can hear, loud and clear, the themes of Marcarelli’s script: prejudice, judgment, and small-mindedness.

At the beginning of the movie, the men’s only real problem seems to be the extensive renovations they’re making on their house. But when Michael (Jason Butler Harner), a teacher in a private school, is mistakenly accused of molesting a student from a troubled home, the town begins to turn on the couple—their contractor begs off finishing the work; Daniel (Cheyenne Jackson), who owns a café, loses a big catering job. Worse, their own relationship and their friendships (how nice to see Illeana Douglas again, here in the role of Michael’s cancer-stricken colleague) threaten to explode under the pressure.

The film has a rather melodramatic—though surprising—climax, and the eerie music that pops up every time things get particularly bad seems to belong to a different genre. But the movie has much to offer, especially in its cast, which includes the Broadway favorite Jackson as well as the lovely Julia Ormond, as a lesbian lawyer who knows that green can hide some very ugly colors.

Distinguishing Characteristics

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Below, Part I, is an unfinished piece I wrote shortly after 9/11. 

Part I 

Dental implants. Old burn scar covering entire right knee. Gold tooth.

My idea at first was to write a poem about the distinguishing marks, which were at once lyrical and heartbreaking and overwhelming. To this end I carried a spiral notebook up to the armory. People gathered there to register their missing, and the walls outside were plastered with hundreds of flyers showing pictures, giving descriptions of their relatives and their clothing, telling where they were last seen. This is when we were calling them missing.

I also carried a cheap automatic camera that my credit-card company had given me as a gift (I found out why when I developed the pictures, which were hardly worth keeping). I took only a few pictures. The first was of a bride (at first I wrote “a bridge”; this seems significant) and groom in Madison Square Park. I’d always been leery of the whole institution of marriage, but something about the delicacy of the short tulle veil—lifting as the bride ran a little, smiling, her new husband right behind her, both of them of a dark-skinned extraction that would not help them in the coming days—tugged at something inside me, made me want to cry as so many things did.

I also took a couple of pictures of the flyers, which were ubiquitous, well before I got to the armory; they were on lampposts, on windows, on fences. I stopped so many times to read about this person, that person, to take notes, to stare at their faces, that by the time I got to the armory the light was getting very dim. One of the posters that stopped me cold—it was scotch-taped to a store wall—showed a photo of a thirtyish man with his family. That family now begged him, “Please come home!” This made me—inexplicably, guiltily—furious. Of course he would come home if he could! As though it were up to him whether he was dead or alive. And of course he was dead—didn’t they know?

Birthmark on hand in the shape of Puerto Rico.

In the shape of Puerto Rico? What shape was that? I had to look at an atlas. It’s not like Texas or Florida, not a really distinctive shape. Kind of an oblong island with a curl or a twist here or there. But this island danced every day on the man’s hand, or anyway his loved ones wanted to think so, even while he negotiated the mind-boggling island of Manhattan.

            

That morning I’d gotten an e-mail, among the flurry of e-mails sent in those days, that asked the receiver to add an item to a list of things about Manhattan to love. The woman who’d sent it to me—an old friend who’d moved to Colorado—had written something about bagels. I thought about writing in the Chrysler Building or the sunset from Hudson River Park but never did. It was odd in a way to remind ourselves; could we possibly have forgotten? It came to me, though, that everyone in New York who loves New York (and of course there are those who don’t) thinks secretly that no one loves the city the way they do. If I’m thinking that—even with the occasional fantasy of escaping to a less target-rich, as the military might say, place, some remote corner of Vermont maybe—then so are millions of other people. Which is fine, because otherwise how would we survive here?

Tattoo on left shoulder of whale/dolphins surrounded by starfish. Butterfly tattoo on lower back.

There were many, many tattoos. Imagine someone sitting in a tattoo parlor enduring the pain of that big needle for their own whale, their own dolphin, their own unique butterfly or rose or heart (one of these in the webbed area between the thumb and index finger). They are not thinking, here’s a good way to identify my body when I am crushed or burned to death. There were scars too, which are rather like tattoos that nobody asked for—an appendectomy scar, facial chicken-pox marks, a “bite mark on the chest.”

            

On the way home I passed by the Gramercy Park Hotel. My husband (domestic partner then) was staying in New Jersey, visiting relatives. It occurred to me to check into the hotel, even though my apartment was only a twenty-minute walk away. I wanted to forget everything, even who I was. To be somewhere clean and stark. I thought of the woman in the novel The Hours who checks into a hotel just so she can read. I didn’t have to be anywhere the next day because my office, like my home, was in the “frozen zone” below 14^th Street. That meant no cars, no people who weren’t residents, and very little business going on. I had to show my ID twice to get home, at 14^th Street and at Houston Street.

At 14^th, I passed through Union Square Park. Amid the flowers, candles, and taped-up signs—“Osama bin Laden, look out” but also “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” …

Part II

I thought then that my idea for a poem—or, rather, a compilation in poem form—had not worked out, but when I recently looked back at what I had, I decided to finish it.

A birthmark in the shape of Puerto Rico

on his hand.

Scar between eyebrows.

A heart tattoo on her right hand,

between the thumb and the index finger.

Gold necklace with jade pig.

Mole at jawbone near right ear.

(Young man:) tattoo of tiger on right shoulder;

(his sister:) gold chain with key charm.

A circular beauty mark

on his right wrist.

Tattoos: dolphin on foot,

turkey on hip.

Right-hand ring finger severely bent;

gold neck chain with cross.

Yellow rose tattoo on right ankle;

orange-and-white sneakers;

two earrings in each ear.

Bite mark on his chest

just below left shoulder.

Appendectomy scar,

birthmark on one of his shoulders,

and a small dark mole in the center

of his back.

Black mole on each cheek,

black spots on his neck.

Has a Florida tan.

Chews tobacco, so first fingers

on his right hand may be stained.

Wearing a gold rope chain on his neck,

with a rectangular charm that says

“Jesus Is Lord.”

Faint birthmark on back of neck

under his hair

(may need to look real hard for it

since very faint).

Has thick hair on his chest,

a very hairy man.

A scar which extends from the

upper right side of forehead to the eyebrow,

which appears to be an upside-down V;

scar on left arm has a black tattoo

one-inch in width

that bands around left bicep.

Two gold bangles and one gold bracelet.

Wearing a wood cross.

Tattoos lower back tribal (dark green),

upper right heart and rose with initials LER.

Has on a silver fossil watch.

Has a French manicure on both her hands

and her feet.

No scars or tattoos.

Brown spot, right shin;

scar from hip surgery;

hammer toes.

Chicken pox scars on cheek.

Gold tooth.

Tattoo on left shoulder of whale/dolphins

surrounded by starfish.

Butterfly tattoo on lower back.

Skin tag on neck;

small scar on chin;

cast on right hand.

Tattoo of Puerto Rican flag

on right arm.

Dental implants.

Old burn scar covering entire right knee.

White gold ring with the letter C

in diamonds.

McDreamy Dancing with Nellie McKay

Originally posted July 10, 2008

Nellie McKay pounds the piano at a “Midsummer Night Swing.”

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

 

An elderly man in a straw hat was getting his mojo on with a flushed, swivel-hipped blonde—I’m talking swing dance—as Nellie McKay (rhymes with McPie) channeled Ella Fitzgerald to sing “A-Tisket A-Tasket” last night at Damrosch Park, in Lincoln Center. McKay—she of the acerbic lyrics, feminist stance, and vegan-activist politics—might seem an unlikely choice to kick off the “Midsummer Night Swing” series (starting with, naturally, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing”). But really, you never know where the 26-year-old might turn up: recently it’s been Broadway—with Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in The Threepenny Opera and as the composer for the forthcoming show Election.

The girl loves music, and it’s clear from her CDs—her latest is Obligatory Villagers—that she’s steeped in all things Tin Pan Alley. Looking demure in a black velvet and red satin dress that seemed an homage to the 40s (big red bow in the back), she appeared delighted to be sharing the stage with the Aristocrats Swing Band, lending her impressive piano skills to such standards as “Satin Doll” and “Take the ‘A’ Train” (on which she also scatted) and picking up a ukelele for “Route 66.”

“It’s like a regular dance hall,” commented my husband as he surveyed the large dance floor between the press box and the outdoor stage, with its purple-curtain backdrop. We were watching pogo-ing punks and smooth-stepping preppies, saddle-shoed boppers and suspendered hoppers, all ignoring the heat and grooving to “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Some of them had doubtless just learned their moves and/or just met their partners; the event began with swing-dance lessons.

Of course a Nellie McKay concert would not be complete without those unique McKay songs (by all appearances, eminently danceable). Nellie performed “The Dog Song,” with its attendant woofs (a little help there from the Hawaiian-shirted band) and “Happy Flower” (“Me and you / We misbehave / We trample fecklessly upon the bladder of our hearts”—see what I mean?).

The series runs through July 26.

Putting the Art in Arthur and Party: Joseph Arthur’s Gallery Closes

Originally posted September 27, 2008

Musician and gallery owner Joseph Arthur

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“MOMAR is finite. It is not an ongoing concern. Its building and its organization will disappear.” Along with other tenets (“MOMAR answers the eternal question ‘What Is Art?’ with another question: ‘what isn’t?’”), this was part of the mission statement of the Museum of Modern Arthur, founded by Joseph Arthur, a painter and poet but best known as a singer/songwriter. His new CD, Temporary People, with his band the Lonely Astronauts, comes out September 30th.

Because of a dispute with the landlord involving an art installation that includes a mattress, a mannequin head, and shower plumbing, MOMAR is indeed about to disappear. But not without a party, held last Thursday night in the gallery’s space at the end of the earth—Brooklyn’s earth, Dumbo’s earth, Jay Street’s earth. Walk down another half-block and you can put your face against a metal fence marked “The End” and watch the ships glide by, with Manhattan twinkling across the East River’s brown choppy waters.

Or you can just watch from the industrial-metal steps of MOMAR—as I did, with fellow blogger Bob Rosen, letting the wind whip my summer-dressed self into autumn on this rainy, chilly night.

But inside it was warm, T. Rex was playing on the boom box, and impossibly chic-in-that-Williamsburg-way young people were drinking wine, beer, and instant margaritas amid Arthur’s Rorschach-y, amoeba-y, spidery, E.T.-y paintings. (Perhaps his mentor Peter Gabriel describes them better: “They seem to connect to Expressionism, Art Brut, Basquiat and the Graffiti movement.”) Studying my favorite of the works—a set of nine (one piece unceremoniously fell off the wall, prompting a woman in very high sandals to scale a ladder and tape it back up)—was the dancer Michelle Mola, to whom I was drawn by her DKNY-but-looks-like-vintage coat (my first glimpse of her was when the very tall Arthur lifted the very small Mola way off her feet in greeting). Mola, she told me, sometimes performs with Arthur but was delicately kicked off the stage when, dressed as Cupid (it was Valentine’s Day), she attempted to dance along when Arthur made an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman: “They kept saying, ‘Would the dancer move downstage,’ ‘Would the dancer move further downstage,’ and then, ‘Would the dancer exit the stage.’”

 Dancer Michelle Mola with Bob Rosen

The question of the night was whether Arthur, whom I wrote about for Vanity Fair’s blog last May, was going to perform (with or without Mola)—and whether he’d do so on the aforementioned mattress, since there was no stage to be seen. Wandering around in a black felt hat and black jacket, he seemed, perhaps taking a cue from his paintings, to be more into just hanging. (For someone who comes across as very laid-back, Jo, as his friends call him, is remarkably productive—check out his website. That’s what he was doing—sitting on the steps outside with a friend, hat still perched on his long, Romantic-poet hair—when Bob and I left the party, still going strong.

Up the street, we stopped to look at a homemade shrine, featuring a photo of a Chihuahua, attached to the wall of a converted factory. “Are you interested in Chicken?” asked a woman in a black trench coat who suddenly appeared out of the darkness. She explained that she’d rescued the dog, named Chicken, and that he’d been beloved in the neighborhood, but that he’d been hit by a car crossing the street to their building. (Without meaning to, I had the sad thought, Why did the Chicken cross the road?) She stopped to fix a few of the shrine’s tchotchkes—a tiny Ganesh statue, a tiny blue bowl, a tiny duck—before going inside.

This made Dumbo seem like a small, sweet town but also somehow like Oz, with not a yellow-brick road but a cobblestone one, and with a wizardly glowing place of art at the end of the line, about to disappear.

Still on the Bus

The Magic Bus

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood

Starring: Ken Kesey, The Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady, The Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, and Stanley Tucci

By Robert Rosen

Watching Magic Trip, a film shot in 1964 and finally put together in a coherent form some 47 years later, is like watching a home movie of a family vacation. Except the family in question is The Merry Pranksters, a band of psychedelic pioneers led by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey. And the vacation in question is a cross-country road trip, from Kesey’s Oregon farm to the New York World’s Fair, in a customized, wildly painted, 1939 school bus called Further (or Furthur), driven by Neal Cassady, who served as the model for Dean Moriarty, the main character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. And everybody on this bus was stoned on LSD most of the time. And pot. And speed. And a couple of other things.

Ken Kesey

Historically, it was quite a time. JFK had recently been murdered in Dallas. The Beatles had arrived. Vietnam was heating up. LSD was still legal. The Beat Generation, as Kerouac called it, was over. And hippies didn’t yet exist.

I might have been only 11 when The Pranksters were making their momentous journey, (and I hadn’t even heard of LSD), but I still feel a personal connection to this film. Because, in a manner of speaking, I was on the bus—though I didn’t know it yet. There’s an expression in Tom Wolfe’s comprehensive study of The Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test: “You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.” Which I’ve always taken to mean, you’re either a Prankster at heart or you’re not.

Neal Cassady drives the bus.

And if there was ever any doubt as to where I stood with The Merry Pranksters, it was laid to rest in 1986, when I met a Prankster.

I was working in New York as a men’s magazine editor at the time, and I’d been buying stories from a writer in Oregon whose outrageous and hilarious erotic fiction had leaped out of the slush pile. Just before Thanksgiving that year, this mysterious author came to New York to visit me at the magazine office. That’s when I found out he was John Babbs aka Sometimes Missing—all the Pranksters had nicknames—younger brother of Ken Babbs aka Intrepid Traveler.

John Babbs, circa 1964.

John and I became friends, and I’d occasionally visit him in Springfield, Oregon, where a colorful cardboard cutout of Further stood on his fireplace mantle. We went camping, fished for trout—he was a passionate fisherman and wrote a novel about it, Yellow Leaves—tooled around town in his big old Mercury convertible, played full-court basketball at the YMCA, smoked a bit of weed, and drank a bit of beer. Such was the idyllic life of a Prankster in the late ’80s. Once when he visited me in New York, I hired John to help me out at the office. He spent a few days organizing into the proper pornographic categories photos for some of the magazines I was editing—good work for a Prankster if you can get it.

Robert Rosen (left) and John Babbs, 1987, New York City.

Watching Magic Trip reminded me that I hadn’t heard from John in a few years, so I got back in touch with him. He told me that he hadn’t seen the movie yet, which somehow wasn’t surprising. John seems to live outside time, outside money, outside fashion, outside most things that might demand the attention of a 21^st century New Yorker.

John Babbs self-portrait: Trout Fishing in Oregon.

Magic Trip also reminded me how quickly time passes, how strange it must be for The Pranksters, many now in their 70s, to sit in a theatre and watch their youthful selves of 1964 “tootling the multitudes,” as they called it.

So, this is not a review of this time capsule of a film. It’s merely an acknowledgement that Magic Trip exists, and that I’m delighted to have finally seen this long-lost footage of the late Ken Kesey, a writer I’ve always admired and would have liked to have met; of Ken Babbs, whom I did meet, and who recently published a novel, Who Shot the Water Buffalo? based on his experiences as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam; of the Grateful Dead, when they were still The Warlocks and their job was to provide the soundtrack to the “Acid Tests,” those massive Kesey-organized gatherings where everybody drank the “electric” Kool Aid, and were probably better for it.

Before they were The Dead.

And, of course, I’m glad Magic Trip motivated me to get back in touch with John Babbs, whom I’m proud to call my friend, and who has allowed me to feel an intimate connection to a home movie that I wish I could have been part of.

Festival’s End: One Last Film, One Last Party

Originally posted May 8, 2008.

Keith Haring’s “The Last Rainforest” © The Estate of Keith Haring.

 

Director Christina Clausen at Soho House.

The Universe of Keith Haring
Directed by Christina Clausen
90 minutes

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Last Saturday evening, I attended a screening of Christina Clausen’s film The Universe of Keith Haring at the Soho House in NYC’s Meatpacking District, along with fellow bloggers Robert Rosen and Julio Malone, who’d met Clausen at a recent Tribeca Film Festival event.

I had happened to overhear about a week ago, right before a T.F.F. screening of Squeezebox!, the novelist Jay McInerney talking about the ubiquity of Haring’s work in New York in the 80s, how you could hardly walk out of your building without seeing some freshly painted Haring figures on a wall, on somebody’s jacket, on a subway platform. I remember that too, especially, for some reason, his Christmas-greeting Madonna (the Jewish one, though Haring was friends with the other) and Child. I recall walking into the Christopher Street subway station and suddenly coming upon the deceptively simple curving lines that suggested a veil, a woman’s face, and the baby she was holding, all surrounded by Haring’s signature little lines, a bit like rays but more about kinetic energy—nearly every one of his creations, no matter how bizarre, seemed to be jumping for joy.

And there’s a lot of joy in Clausen’s film. Many people loved the wiry, bespectacled Haring, including his supportive family—he had grown up in the Norman Rockwell-esque Kutztown, Pennsylvania, but came into his own in New York—and close friends such as DJ Junior Vasquez and fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Yoko Ono. Haring was very much of his time, diving into the early-80s swirling underground scene of sex (the Baths), clubs (Paradise Garage and Club 57), and rock ’n’ roll (the B-52s). Through interviews, film footage—when Haring spray-paints a mural on a wall in record time, you can almost see those kinetic lines shooting out from his own body—and narration by Haring himself (courtesy of his biographer, John Gruen), Clausen does indeed capture his universe, even as it changed with the advent of AIDS. AIDS, of course, claimed Haring in 1990; he would have been 50 on May 4.

Over champagne at the cocktail reception that followed the screening, in a little bar area next to the theater, Clausen confided to a few of us her concern that the reaction to the screening seemed “cold.” But we assured her that instead the audience appeared to be stunned by Haring’s death (Scharf nearly breaks down when speaking of it)—no matter that we knew the fact of it—after getting to know him in this way. I asked Clausen, who is Danish but lives in Rome, if she’d ever met Haring. She said she hadn’t thought so when she decided to do the film, but while going through photographs for it she realized that as a high-school student she had once seen him. At a Copenhagen museum, where he’d come to do a mural, she locked eyes with him, in a way that she now feels was meaningful.

Who knows if that encounter planted the seed for Clausen’s film? I’m just glad to have had the opportunity to wander into Keith Haring’s poly-wondrous universe, even though I feel I’ve been there before.